The bidding for household help hasn’t been equaled since Simon Legree went out of business. Fine friendships are falling apart like a tired cemetery bouquet, as women lure price[les]s human jewels from women.
Oh, these poor women. Certainly the death of former servants is nothing compared to broken pinky promises and the end to afternoon gossip sessions. It was sickening! Did no one else see it? Now some might think that I was just sympathizing with my distant Bering Strait–linked relatives (a suspect theory). I sympathized, sure. But I sympathized as a human being, one whose ancestors knew what it was like to be forced onto a reservation.
Empathy is fossilized in our bones.
I thought about Tsa Tsi’s great-uncle and if I would sneak food to an internment camp if the government chose Cherokee, North Carolina, as its next prison site. Would they just throw me in with the rest of the “others” who fit into the wrong box? No one would miss me if I didn’t show up to work. For once in their lives, those Japanese Americans must have wished they were just Japanese in America, like the diplomats and nationals that I’d be serving at the inn. Being American had somehow made being Japanese harder. Citizenship by choice complicated an identity assumed at birth.
Funny how things get twisted when people are in a hurry. I guess Bud was right sometimes.
He was right, too, that there is value in work. Even if that work only serves those who aren’t aware of your existence. Would the next few months ahead of me help me understand the San Francisco situation far better than I really wanted? I laughed a little thinking that I might be considered some woman’s “human jewel.” Hopefully all of my orders would be coming from the inn’s remaining skeleton staff manager. He, of course, was the one who had placed the ad and responded to my letter of interest. No matter where I was, the US military would expect me to fall into their tight, neat lines. And that’d be okay for the summer. The truth is I didn’t know what to expect, and no amount of reading newspapers was really helping with that. I could be thankful the unknown was just over the mountain and not in some foreign country, like where all my cousins had been sent. Lishie would say that I should give thanks for whatever little morsel I could find.
I closed my eyes. Whatever morsel. I had a paying job. Maybe even one that would pay enough for the first semester of college if I decided to actually go. I had a good excuse not to spend all summer at Bud’s feet, listening to his quarrelsome ranting in the muggy heat. I wouldn’t waste my life never seeing what life could be like away from Cherokee. And probably most importantly, I had the girl, Essie, to look forward to. A couple of hours alone with a beautiful girl would certainly be more than a morsel’s worth.
Chapter Four
The rattling gearshift seemed to rise between us, expanding into a border separating our two worlds. She smelled of lavender and honeysuckle, a scent that defied all boundaries and invaded my awareness. So I revved the engine, forgetting what my uncle had taught me: “Clutch is clutch, dammit!”
Despite my nervousness around her, we had practically grown up together, caught in the slow churn of the Qualla Boundary, tiny Cherokee, North Carolina, hours away from Asheville, the nearest city anyone could call such. We were products of “the reservation,” pronounced low and quickly by us—rezervashun. Broken into at least five whispered syllables when spoken by visitors or neighbors across the mountain—thuh-rez-her-vay-shuuun.
We were “cousins of cousins’ cousins, or something like that,” Lishie often recalled. A classification less about tree branches and more about confined timeless existence.
Of course, I instinctively knew who she was. I was fairly certain I knew who she would become. Watching her was like watching a summer storm’s lightning charge, the flash that illuminates the sky. She was the bolt that strikes fast across the horizon, downward toward its target, an unsuspecting lone tree whose roots are no longer its security, but rather become the very circuit for which the charge swells. The energy’s force overcomes everything idle and ordinary. And you know it from the moment the air vibrates with warning thunder. Her future, everything that would come after her nineteen-year-old reality, was too powerful for most of us to follow.
I knew this the first day I saw her, over a decade prior to our trip. She was a child of maybe seven or eight playing in the cool shallows of the Oconaluftee River, downstream from where I fished for speckled trout and dug ruddy crayfish from beneath mossy rocks. Her goldenrod skirt was hiked up to just above her scarred knees, and dark strands of hair fell ragged along the slopes of her downward-peering face. She, too, was searching for fish, but not to snare as I had set out to do. While I was dedicated to their capture, she was more concerned with studying the free movement of the fish that maneuvered past her stick-thin legs. Out of a patient stillness, she darted after a quick-moving knotty head, marveling at its agile speed, then snatched it from the water, only to release it immediately. Within minutes by the river, I had slipped on the filmy rocks and busted my ass. I was soaked. Though she took far fewer precautions, she never fell. She never even seemed to come unbalanced.
However, judging from the way she introduced herself on the sagging porch of her father’s cabin all these years later, she remembered nothing of me. And judging from the past fifteen minutes of this car ride from Cherokee to Asheville, she did not care to.
The sum of her words amounted to “Hello. Pleased to meet you. I’m Essie Stamper. Thank you very kindly for the ride.”
I’d done my best to conceal my excitement when the request came from Preacherman to help Essie arrive safely at her summer job at the Grove Park Inn. I wanted credit for a burden borne, and to earn that I had to at least appear as if I were actually burdened. I figured it could help to pardon me from a few Sunday or Wednesday nights’ church services. Despite my resolve, it was still difficult to shoo away the grin as I loaded her suitcases into the car’s trunk. I felt something intimate about preparing for a trip together, even if others had arranged most of the preparation.
Preacherman told me that Essie was just working at the inn for the summer to earn money for college. “One smart cookie,” he offered one day after church. “If you keep your mouth shut and ears open, you might just learn a thing or two.”
I hoped that Preacherman did not provide Essie with an overview of my own background, which would include a failed attempt at Oak Ridge Junior College (an institution I’d only been accepted into as recognition of my father’s World War I service and been able to afford with federal relief aid dollars), and the last year of my nineteen-year-old existence working odd jobs in Cherokee. I coveted this opportunity to introduce myself on my own terms, to present the Cowney detached from family binds or awkward tales of my fumbling youth. Though I was unsure if she had any impression of me at all, I wanted desperately to craft one for her. I wanted us to be immediate confidants, as if we shared years of inside jokes, had nicknames for each other, could speak without vocalizing words. I wanted to assume that Lishie’s recollection of being distant cousins was merely the ramblings of an aging grandmother insistent that the whole damn reservation was related. I wanted to speak to her like I am speaking to you now. I wanted her to have never heard anyone else’s opinion of me save, perhaps, my mother’s and Jesus Christ’s.